Today’s pop quiz: Who’s going to take a tougher stand against racism, prominent journalists or FORTUNE 500 companies?
We now know the answer, courtesy of Don Imus, who thought it was funny to describe the African-American college students who play basketball for Rutgers as “nappy-haired hos.â€
His pals—well-known journalists Bob Schieffer and Jeff Greenfield, top dogs Evan Thomas and Jon Meacham of Newsweek, and others—have reacted by saying, in effect, that the show must go on.
But American Express, General Motors, Procter & Gamble and Staples decided that enough is enough, and pulled their advertising. Seeing all that money headed out the door, General Electric-owned NBC said on Wednesday that its MSNBC cable network would drop Imus in the Morning.
Strange, isn’t it? Journalists who are so frequently accused of being liberal make excuses for a bigot, er, I mean, shock jock. Corporations which are so often seen as uncaring do him in.
This fuss over Imus comes in the context of his long, well-documented history of making or tolerating racist, sexist and anti-gay “jokes†on his program. He compared black reporter Gwen Ifill (then of the New York Times) to a cleaning lady. He backed up one of his sidekicks who said that Venus and Serena Williams should pose in National Geographic and not Playboy. He replayed a comment by his brother Fred who said, about the search for an alleged murderer of gay men: “Why are their bothering to catch this guy? He’s just whacking off freaks.†[Thanks to Imus Watch on www.tompaine.com for this list.]
In that light, please consider what some prominent journos have been saying about Imus.
CBS’s Schieffer: “I’m not going to sever a relationship with someone who has apologized for what he said. I hate what he did, but he’s still my friend.â€
Newsweek’s Meacham: “We don’t want to rush to judgment….Imus appears genuine about changing his tone.â€
Peter Osnos, former Washington Post reporter, now a book editor: “He’s not a bigot. But he was a jerk…I would prefer not to see him driven off the air.â€
Friendship is wonderful, but these enablers and apologist ought to walk down the hall and ask their black colleagues what they think about Imus. I suspect they’d be told that Imus’s “jokes” provide cover for the racist, sexists and homophobes in his audience.
Corporations, by contrast, don’t have friends or feelings. Big business has to be, well, business-like in dealing with Imus.
Put another way, the people in charge of Amex and P&G and Staples may care about racism, sexism and homophobia, or they may not. But they are being paid to care about their black, female and gay customers and employees. Imus, they decided, had crossed a line. Maybe it was the fact that he was going after college girls. Maybe it was the low-key dignity of their response. Maybe it was the way the Internet amplified his comments. Whatever. The companies pulled their ads.
Then NBC—reacting not to Imus’s stupid comment, which after all was made a week ago, but to the advertiser pullout—announced on Wednesday that it would take Imus’s program off MSNBC. The network did not suddenly discover its moral qualms about airing Imus. But NBC, it turns out, is quite literally more sensitive than the big-name journalists it employs.
Two cheers for capitalism.
Jeers for the journalists.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Mark, you hit the nail on the head. Imus and his coterie of cohorts could marginalize the latest of a long line of hateful remarks, but the callousness and meanness of spirit of his banter — when the target was those wonderful Rutgers college students–crossed the line. Does any company, or for that matter, and responsible person who doesn’t gain an advantage by being part of the Imus stable, want to be associated with this homophobic provocateur? I stopped listening to Imus a few years ago when I realized he just preyed on people and their prejudices, and that humor was a vehicle to make it appear less heartfelt..or less real. Not so when the victims are 18-22 year-old college students who just achieved an athelete’s dream season. The advertisers, given a fresh whiff of Imus’s pointed view,smelled something rotten in Imus and his peanut gallery. Money talks and Imus walks.
Well said, Clint, and thanks for commenting. I was interested to read this morning that NBC took him off after consulting with its employees. Al Roker, among others, had had enough. This, to me, is an example of big companies exercising their market power in a responsible way.
Wonderfully done! Says it better than anything I’ve read so far.
Agreed. The key to blotting out — or at least reducing — bigotry is to marginalize it, to make it clear that it is not part of the mainstream. The people you cited above (and there were others, such as Newsweek’s Evan Thomas and Boston Globe’s Tom Oliphant, as quoted in the NYTimes), who just sort of shrugged it off.
By the way, I’ve read a lot of the commentary on the Imus flap (and there has been a lot), and the best piece so far was Michael Wilbon’s in the Washington Post’s Sports section. For my money, he is one of the best commentators on race issues. I remember thinking the same thing of his column on the O.J. verdict. See his column at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/10/AR2007041001891.html
Finally, I say that we should not stop with Imus. Let’s run the table now. There are a lot of bums like him out there spouting off. We should similarly isolate them, push them off on the margins as we have Imus (who is probably not even the worst of the lot). This could be liberating.